[[document-context]]
== View a document in context

Once you've narrowed your search to a specific event,
you might want to inspect the documents that occurred
immediately before and after the event. With the Context view,
you can do just that for index patterns that contain time-based events.

To open the Context view, click the expand icon (<) in the document table, and then click
*View surrounding documents.*

The documents are sorted
by the time field specified in the index pattern and displayed using the
same set of columns as the *Discover* view from which the context was opened.
The anchor document is highlighted in blue.


[role="screenshot"]
image::images/Discover-ContextView.png[Image showing context view feature, with anchor documents highlighted in blue]

[float]
[[filter-context]]
=== Filter the context

The
filters you applied in *Discover* are carried over to the Context view. Pinned filters remain active, while normal
filters are copied in a disabled state. You can re-enable these filters to
refine your context view.

If the Context view contains a large number of documents not related to the event under
investigation, you can use filters to restrict the documents to
display.

[float]
[[change-context-size]]
=== Change the number of surrounding documents

By default, the five newest and oldest
documents are listed. To increase the number of documents that surround the anchor document,
click *Load*.  Five documents are added with each click.

[float]
[[configure-context-ContextView]]
=== Configure the context view

To configure the Context view, use these settings in <<advanced-options,
Advanced Settings>>.

[horizontal]
`context:defaultSize`:: The number of documents to display by default.
`context:step`:: The default number of documents to load with each button click.
`context:tieBreakerFields`:: The field to use for tiebreaking in case of equal time field values.
The default is the
`_doc` field.
+
You can enter a comma-separated list of field
names, which is checked in sequence for suitability when a context is
displayed. The first suitable field is used as the tiebreaking
field. A field is suitable if the field exists and is sortable in the index
pattern the context is based on.
+
Although not required, it is recommended to only
use fields that have {ref}/doc-values.html[doc values] enabled to achieve
good performance and avoid unnecessary {ref}/modules-fielddata.html[field
data] usage. Common examples for suitable fields include log line numbers,
monotonically increasing counters and high-precision timestamps.
